


ave, lucifer

by muined



Category: Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Canon, the afterlife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 13:16:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17244908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muined/pseuds/muined
Summary: Clevinger was surprised to find himself in Hell.





	ave, lucifer

**Author's Note:**

> Titled after the excellent Os Mutantes song of the same name. Any affectation of Heller’s style was unintentional, but apparently it comes with the territory.

Clevinger was surprised to find himself in Hell. He was sentenced to eternity there by a mustachioed devil who resembled very much the colonel who had, in life, found him guilty of sedition.

"You, the defendant, are formally charged with failure to question authority, with jingoism, with blind obedience, with indiscriminate murder by bomb, with being a sma—”

"Being a smart guy, listening to classical music and so on," Clevinger finished for the judge, glumly, knowingly. Select faults of his were apparently universal.

Time failed in Hell, and so though Dunbar had died after Clevinger, Dunbar was there to greet Clevinger when he arrived. Dunbar was overjoyed with the prospect of eternal life, and went about his infernal activities smiling as Clevinger had never known him to. Dunbar could now, finally, enjoy himself, his years, years and years unheeded. The burden of Time had been lifted from his shoulders.

"I've been paroled, though," Dunbar told Clevinger. "Because I managed at the very end to get together the courage to disobey orders. Not that it matters to me whether I'm down here or up there." Dunbar had been wrong about God’s being dead, and was pleased as punch about it. Because he didn't have a preference either way, Clevinger asked Dunbar to stay in Hell with him for the time being, and so Dunbar recidivized, lapsed periodically into misbehavior much like he had on Pianosa, to avoid being granted his leave to Heaven. “What about you?” Dunbar asked.

“A cloud ate me,” was Clevinger’s answer, uncharacteristically laconic.

Dunbar caught Clevinger up on his own doings since Clevinger had become that cloud’s meal: Dunbar, Clevinger learned, had been disappeared for insubordination. Well, no, first, after attacking an invalid soldier in the hospital, he had been chloroformed and had woken up in the Group Headquarters building, sitting for a secret meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Korn. “It’s over,” Korn had said, his fat brown face lit from below by the desk lamp that was the only light source in Colonel Cathcart’s dark office.

Dunbar hadn’t liked the sound of that; Dunbar didn’t like endings. “What is?” he asked, his face screwed up.

“The war. The war’s over for you, Dunbar, provided you take me up on a little deal.” Dunbar’s presence on the base—the stink he was making about bombing innocent Italian villagers and the bombs he was wasting on empty pastureland and ocean—was hurting morale. Korn offered to relieve Dunbar of his remaining missions, to send him back home, if he agreed to shut up and stop acting the agitator, and to endorse Korn and Cathcart in the states. “I understand you, son. You’re a very smart boy; you could go far. You just have these pesky principles that keep tripping you up.”

Dunbar had laughed bitterly. “You may think you understand me, Colonel, but you don’t. I have no intention of living a good life—just a long one. You can go ahead and court-martial me. I’ll keep screaming.” But he hadn’t been prepared for what they did to him in lieu of a court-martial. He’d been shepherded, by the same anonymous, insidious mustachioed colonel that had tried Clevinger, into the hands of Milo Minderbinder’s genial German business associates, who had been only too happy to deposit Dunbar in a POW camp. Of course Dunbar had initially relished the experience, but tedium’s novelty had worn thin fast. He had starved.

Hell was other people, a French playwright had informed the world in the year of Clevinger’s death, and accordingly Clevinger's Hell was peopled solely with those he had met in life. His archenemy, Scheisskopf, lurked at the shadowy edges of his field of vision, glowering and wraithlike, a menacing, teeth-gnashing thunderhead, until Dunbar sidled over and with one thumb outstretched growled at Scheisskopf to "screw." The former general, now in Tartarus stripped of his title and any accompanying authority, was compelled to evaporate. Dunbar's other thumb remained hooked round Clevinger's belt loop. Dunbar's gestures of affection were subdued, understated like this.

McWatt, Clevinger's tentmate on Pianosa, avoided him, as he did everyone; Cathcart, Korn, and Aarfy had been dispatched to lower levels of Hell. Milo was apparently getting on famously with the Prince of Darkness.

"What's the difference between the level He's on and ours?" Clevinger had asked Dunbar.

"Lighting, mostly," Dunbar had replied, semi-frustratingly. "It's darker down there. And hotter." The circle they occupied was, indeed, only tolerably dim and only mildly warm, altogether not unlike a Tuscan summer night.

They found Luciana. "Say, it's that crazy Italian girl friend of Yossarian’s," Dunbar said, pointing her out. Yossarian had returned from his adventure in Rome with Luciana to catch Clevinger and Dunbar kissing amorously; "I was bored without you," Dunbar had explained, then, "and I wanted to keep it that way." Time spent with Clevinger, kissing Clevinger, had moved slow and sweet as molasses. Dunbar, now, took Clevinger’s hand in his. "How'd she die, I wonder?"

"Bopped," Luciana told Clevinger and Dunbar, after they had trotted over.

"Bopped?"

"Bopped over the head with yardstick of one of your white-helmeted _Polizia Americana_ , in a night raid on Rome."

Clevinger's eyes swelled, cloudlike, with condensation, and proceeded to precipitate. "I don't think yardstick is the word you're looking for," was all he was able to offer in condolence.

Dunbar bopped _him_ over the head, gently. "Doesn't matter. We're sorry that it happened."

"Well, wait, you were innocent, then, Luciana, you died innocent; why are you down here?" Clevinger asked.

Luciana demurred. "The French firm I worked for was absorbed by a big American company." M&M: Milo had dragged her down with him. The war had dragged each of them down. It wasn’t fair, Clevinger thought, not for the first time. They had been messengers—he and Dunbar had only delivered the bombs. And he had always so diligently, so conscientiously minded his ethics. “Where’s that Yossarian?” asked Luciana.

"Why, that’s right! If time doesn't work down here, why haven't we seen Yossarian around?" Clevinger asked Dunbar. "He was bound to, you know, to shuffle off his mortal coil someday, and I know for a fact that he wasn't headed for anyplace farther skyward than we were."

Dunbar shrugged amiably. "We were wrong about God and about goodness and all that. I don't think we can discount his Supraman theory."

"Superman? Superman?"

"Supraman. Y'know, Flash Gordon," Dunbar elaborated. "The Flying Dutchman."

"Yossarian was not a supraman," Clevinger spat, suddenly upset enough with Dunbar for aping Yossarian-speech to raise his voice. "He had a terminal liver condition!"

"Big liver," Luciana chimed in. "He told me all about it. Wider than a mile."

A week or so before Clevinger had died, he had awoken one morning in his tent. McWatt had been just outside doing calisthenics, could be seen through the flap that served as their door, which he had left open. In through it had buzzed a swarm of gnats, slowly, inevitably. Innocuously, for Clevinger's bed was draped in mosquito netting, and enveloped within it he had been safe. He observed the gnats impartially; they approached incrementally. Together in formation, they were white against the sun, indefinite, inanimate. The gnat cloud reached Clevinger's barrier and crossed it, each of the insects small enough to pass directly through the fine mesh, and suddenly, eerily, they were upon him. Clevinger was dumbfounded. He shivered and examined one gnat, which had landed, cavalier, on his side of the mesh. It was white, and to the farsighted and in that instance glasses-less Clevinger, indefinite. Inanimate.

Dunbar was flourishing. He had procured a skeletal brass-framed bed, and sat astride it now as if it was a hearse, as if it was Death's own ornate carriage and he was Hades himself. He demonstrated aptitude in infernal machinations, thanks to his lifelong preoccupation with death. His demonic superiors told him he had managerial potential. Dunbar had reason to believe that he could use this to his advantage. He expressed interest in becoming an Angel of Death, and maybe someday shepherding “that rat bastard Korn” into the great beyond, as Korn had done for him. Returning the favor, he said.

"And maybe I can grease a few palms, add you as my plus-one in, you know." Dunbar pointed wordlessly upwards. There was, as one would intuit, much graft in Hell, so much that Clevinger riding Dunbar's coattails to Heaven didn't seem impossible. "Harps and angels and pearly gates and all that."

Clevinger's cloud had approached slowly, inevitably. His plane had fallen out of the sky after the cloud was upon him, after both radial engines had stalled simultaneously on a freak fluke. It had dropped silently through a void of pure white before emerging from the bottom of the low-hanging cumulus and being swallowed by the tranquil ocean, nose-first, before anyone could utter a word. The water had broken every pane of his bombardier’s window instantly, pelting Clevinger, perforating him with shards of glass before he was drowned aggressively by the oncoming gallons of water that shot past him as his plane plummeted intact to the seafloor, leaving no debris. The process was neat and efficient, killing every airman aboard in less than a minute. "If there're columns of clouds involved I'm not interested," Clevinger insisted to Dunbar.

He hadn't had time to think of anything at all before dying, but immediately afterward the first thing to occur to him had been that for all he had admonished Yossarian for his reluctance to lay down his life, Clevinger had never considered that he himself would have to do so. It hadn't been for any cause at all; it had been for a cloud, apolitical and banal. White against the sun, indefinite, inanimate. "Besides, you don't want me," he continued to Dunbar, sensitive. He faced now Yossarian’s truth, the reality in which he was to toil for eternity: Yossarian was a supraman, because he chose to be when he chose to avoid conscientiously the possibility of death. Clevinger had rendered himself mortal by ever arguing against Yossarian. But Clevinger hadn’t known that at the time. He had assumed—accidentally, unconsciously he had stumbled into the assumption that he was invulnerable. Clevinger hadn't thought the gnats could touch him; he hadn't thought a cloud could sink him. In short, he had died a dope.

“You don’t want me,” Clevinger repeated. “You want Yossarian. You always have. Like everyone else. Why wouldn’t you?”

Dunbar was deathly serious. "Yossarian is alive, and so long as he is we can leave him out of the equation. I want you. Come to bed," he ordered Clevinger, patting the mattress beside him. Clevinger obeyed. He sinned, and it was good.


End file.
